


a softer beginning

by dantique



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Martyn & Cornelia - Freeform, Moving House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 17:08:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10223093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dantique/pseuds/dantique
Summary: They’d made this place safe together, filled their cluttered shelves with pictures and figurines and rows of their mingled DVD collection, stuck googly-eyes to the light switches and posters of boybands to the bathroom door. Dan can’t wait to do those things anew in a proper house of their own.(Dan and Phil move house)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [a softer beginning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10795602) by [irni_mak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/irni_mak/pseuds/irni_mak)



They’re sat on the floor of a mostly empty flat, all bare bones and swept floors and six years packed up into boxes. Dan’s propped against the couch, his elbow digging into the sunken cushions behind him, flat and sagging from the thousands of hours they’ve spent sat watching Netflix. A van will come by tomorrow to pick it up and take it to the charity shop, and even though it’s lumpy and worn and there’s a brand new sofa due to be dropped off at the new place, Phil feels a small twinge of fondness for the sofa crease that’s been six years in the making.

“Are you actually getting all misty-eyed over our awful sofa?” Dan says, his mouth lifted in a tiny smirk as he catches Phil watching him from where he’s sat cross-legged in front of the fire.

“It kind of feels like part of the family now,” Phil says, his fist clenched by his heart in exaggerated reminiscence. He’s joking, mostly. Dan laughs and rolls his eyes, but he gets it. This is the most excited he’s ever felt about anything. A warm buzz of anticipation’s been settled in his stomach for at least the past two weeks, but there’s nothing about this moment that doesn’t feel kind of final. Like this is the last night that they’ll ever be the people they are right now, like tomorrow everything changes. The apartment feels colder for its sudden emptiness, and when they speak there’s an echo that reminds Dan of the first day they’d moved in. 

Phil lifts his cup from where it’s balanced on the arm of the sofa and reaches it toward Dan. They’re drinking red wine out of plastic cups, all their cutlery neatly boxed up and stacked in the hallway. There’s a spark in Phil’s eyes that wasn’t there that first day here six years ago. Back then it had been exhaustion, stress, a brimming fear that it’d all go wrong and the radio would decide they weren’t good enough, that they’d end up completely broke and forced back to live with their parents. 

Dan clinks his cup against Phil’s and downs the wine, thinks of how this flat saw them grow into themselves. And god, he can’t wait to get out of here, they’re desperate for space and a backyard for a dog and he never wants to hear the words ‘gas leak’ ever again. But he can’t help but panic, just a little bit, at the fact that that unbearably hot day they’d first moved in had been over six years ago now.

That had been 25 year old Phil who’d starfished beside him on the bathroom floor, who’d helped him put together crappy furniture and listened to him test out the piano and indulged his desire to buy the fluffiest white rug he’d been able to find despite knowing he’d end up regretting it. They’d made this place safe together, filled their cluttered shelves with pictures and figurines and rows of their mingled DVD collection, stuck googly-eyes to the light switches and posters of boybands to the bathroom door. He’s romanticising things, he knows, and he can’t wait to do those things anew in a proper house of their own. 

There’s a beginning and an end in this moment.

 

* * *

 

“We should probably get up.” Dan’s not sure if the words are even decipherable, his voice soft and low with sleepiness. Phil’s knee is shoved uncomfortably between Dan’s legs, and he tightens his arms around Dan’s chest as Dan’s words break the quiet stillness of early morning.

They’re on the mattress in Dan’s room, both their bedsteads having been taken apart already. Phil’s donating his to the charity shop as the wicker is coming loose and it scratches him every time he sits against it. 

“Mm, not yet,” he mumbles into the back of Dan’s neck. In the distance, Dan can hear faint drilling and he grins into his pillow.

“We never have to hear drilling at the crack of fucking dawn ever again.” Dan’s voice in the morning is quiet and broken, makes Phil think of Dan’s pixelated face on his laptop screen and hushed phone calls at four in the morning, back when they’d been separated by 300 kilometres and a shitty Skype connection. He sounds young like this, and it makes Phil’s chest ache.

“Don’t speak too soon,” he says, voice deep and croaky with disuse. The curls at the back of Dan’s neck brush against Phil’s lips as he talks. “Maybe our new neighbours will be in, like, a screamo band or something.”

“That’s preferable, to be honest,” says Dan, and he shifts from Phil’s arms, sits up. The sky outside is overcast and Dan’s face is masked in shadows, Phil’s blurry vision casting him in a soft, unfocused glow. He reaches across Phil, his hands steady as they pluck Phil’s glasses from the floor beside the mattress and gently slide them onto Phil’s face, and everything is clear.

 

* * *

 

Martyn and Cornelia come over bearing Starbucks, as their coffee supply is stowed away in a box somewhere. It’s a morning of attempting not to appear out of breath in front of the removalists as the four of them help carry boxes out to the van. At one point Dan offers them tea, only to remember halfway to the kitchen that it’s all packed away. Phil almost trips down the stairs with a box of mugs in his arms, Cornelia managing to salvage the situation by grabbing his arm through the banisters and holding him steady. 

The rain outside plasters their hair to their foreheads and makes the boxes slightly soggy, but Dan thinks the dampness is preferable to the oppressive heat of the day they’d first moved to London. This time no one’s frazzled, and Dan stands beside Phil on the pavement as Martyn slides the last box into the moving van, thinks fleetingly that their eight years together is stowed away in that van, ready to be driven twenty minutes away and unpacked, re-sorted, filed away. 

“Weird that our whole life is in that van,” Phil murmurs, and Dan grins stupidly at how in-sync they are sometimes. It makes something behind his ribcage flutter, that Phil thinks of their lives as intertwined, singular. 

Dan murmurs his agreement, his fingers brushing Phil’s, and he aches with the truth of it.

 

* * *

 

Their new place is crumbling red bricks and a vine that’s sprawled lazily across one side of the facade. There’s a wonky garden path and the front door’s painted red, and Dan had had a weird moment when they’d first been to see the house where he’d pictured a jumble of shoes piled by a welcome mat, Phil’s trainers and his own black high-tops and two pairs of muddy children's wellies. 

Inside it’s white walls and high ceilings and creaky floorboards flecked with paint. There are four bedrooms (“You guys have so much  _storage_ now, wow,” Cornelia remarks, carrying a box of assorted props into one of them, and Dan winks at her), and they agree to each have one of their own. It goes unspoken that they’ll wind up in the same bed anyway, but it’s safer, Phil thinks, to have somewhere to go when things get messy. Dan is the best person Phil has ever known and he doesn’t think he could ever get sick of him really, but they’re only human and sometimes they both just crave solitude and a space of their own. 

The third bedroom’s the office, and the purpose of the fourth goes unspoken, for now. Phil trails a finger over the bumpy walls, textured white plaster and the smooth wood of the window frame. This room is storage for now, but Phil thinks of  _one day_ , distant but almost tangible, thinks of painting the walls to match the morning sky and a bookcase filled with children’s books.

The upstairs bathroom had been painted a grandmotherly shade of pinkish-orange ( _“Apricot,”_ Phil had chimed in helpfully _, “it’s a common bathroom colour on ‘Escape to the Country’”),_ which Dan had insisted they paint white. 

_“It’s the ugliest colour on earth, Phil,”_ he’d whined, so they’d spent  two full days painting it, Dan in a pair of dungarees they’d bought for a video and Phil in his oldest, worn hoodie. 

_“This bathroom doesn’t have double-sinks, the couples on House Hunters would not have been impressed,”_  Phil had quipped, and Dan had groaned, flicked paint from his brush onto Phil’s hair.  

_“There, you’re a grandpa now,”_  he’d teased,and Phil had just raised an eyebrow, swallowed a suggestive remark, grabbed Dan’s chin and given him a painty beard. 

Downstairs is Phil’s favourite. It had been slightly cramped when they’d first walked in, a decent-sized living room that opened onto an art-deco kitchen. There’d been a window overlooking the back garden, the previous owner’s lacy curtains obscuring the view. It had been cosy, a warm space that Phil could picture being comfortable in, he supposed. 

“We should knock out the back wall,” Dan had said, “replace it with glass.” The real estate agent had chimed in with “Oh, that’d look lovely, what a great idea!” and Phil had just smiled, quietly, at Dan. Dan’s cheeks had dimpled as he met Phil’s eyes, and he’d known they were both thinking the same thing, that it would be expensive and completely unnecessary but something that would make this house  _theirs._

Phil stands here now, looking out at the overgrown garden that desperately needs tending, a wall of clear glass before him, and thinks briefly of the Dan and Phil that had sat on a train to London almost six years ago, remembers the weird thrill of successfully putting together Ikea furniture at three in the morning. 

“Phil of 2012 could only  _dream_  of having an actual wall made of glass,” he says aloud, to whoever’s in the room. It’s Martin, hooking the mirror above the fireplace.

“It looks awesome, man,” he says. “Fancy.” There’s a squint to his eyes that looks kind of like fondness, mostly like pride.

 

* * *

 

It’s nearly midnight and Martyn and Cornelia have gone home. There’s rain drumming gently against the wall of glass, soft and insistent. Phil’s dug out fairy lights and strung them along the mantelpiece, filling the room with warm pinpricks of light and illuminating Dan’s mussed up curls. They’re sat on the brand new sofa, a large charcoal-grey monstrosity with actual working springs that’s yet to be indented with a sofa crease. They’ve drunk almost a whole bottle of celebratory champagne between them, empty glasses balanced precariously on the arm of the sofa. Most of their things are still packed away in boxes, and the house is a bit echoey but it feels like warmth. 

There’s a box at their feet, half unpacked and randomly selected by Phil. It’s filled with things from their office, so many old notebooks and ballpoint pens and an instruction manual for their old printer. Phil digs out a packet of felt-tip pens in different colours, draws up their garden on a blank piece of paper. It’s too dark now to see their garden properly through the glass wall, but Phil draws it as he would want it to be, in a perfect world where he had a functioning green thumb. He inks freshly mown grass and a pond filled with koi fish, a vegetable patch raised from the ground.

Dan leans across him, sketches something in brown.

“What is  _that?_ ” Phil laughs, his eyes tired and a little bit blurry despite his glasses.

“A dog, obviously.”

“It looks like a rabbit!” 

“Well sorry, we can’t all be right-handed, jeez,” but Dan’s grinning to himself, laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. He looks older like this, a blanket draped across his shoulders. His cheeks are flushed from the champagne and his face crinkles when he laughs. He looks safe, completely at ease. He looks beautiful.

Phil absentmindedly inks in two stick figures either side of the dog-like rabbit, one unrealistically taller than the other.

“That one’s me, clearly,” he says, pointing to the taller one.

“Oh, clearly.” Dan yawns, and curls his body into Phil’s.

“Can we have sunflowers?” Dan asks. His voice is low and gentle, and he’s warm against Phil’s side, chin tucked over Phil’s shoulder. 

“Ooh yes, good idea,” Phil says, voice hushed and slightly reverential, and Dan inks them in carefully, yellow felt-tip staining the side of his hand.

Dan draws sunflowers with a quiet solemnity, his tongue sticking out between his teeth and his breath huffing softly against Phil’s cheek. 

They’re quiet for a while, the rain against the window the only sound in the room. 

This house feels like something that’s always been meant for them, Phil thinks, sliding his arm around Dan’s back and tugging him close. This roof and these floors and that wall made of glass feel like safety, and warmth, and like home.

 

**Author's Note:**

> apologies for the total lack of a clear POV in this, i'm a mess. 
> 
> feedback is much appreciated!!
> 
> also: follow me on [tumblr](http://dantique.tumblr.com)


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